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A Multi-dimensional Approach to Categorize Bebras Tasks

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Informatics in Schools. Rethinking Computing Education (ISSEP 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 13057))

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Abstract

The Bebras International Challenge of Informatics and Computational Thinking has collected an increasingly large number of tasks. Every year more than 200 new task proposals are submitted of which many are accepted into the task pool. Properly categorizing these tasks to facilitate the use in the national challenges and to reuse them in the future is a challenge in itself: the categorizations in the past were biased and only covered certain aspects. Because the tasks are meant to be used everywhere in the world they are supposed to be solvable by students without any particular knowledge in computer science. General knowledge or skills may be assumed, though.

In this paper a different approach is presented that does not focus on creating perfect categories but rather on different dimensions within which categories must be defined. Such a multi-dimensional approach should offer the ability to find tasks more easily and will fix some of the common shortcomings of the previously used categorizations. The three dimensions covered are: (computer science) topic, Computational Thinking skills, and range of requirements.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The total doesn’t match the totals in Table 1 since for some tasks more than one category may have been chosen and for some tasks no category may have been chosen at all.

  2. 2.

    For this a combination with the proposal from Dagienė, Hromkovič and Lacher [6] might be worth a consideration.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the Bebras community for continuously striving for higher quality and for better use of the resources. Without the many discussions and presentations this paper would not have been possible. This is especially true for the inventor of the Bebras challenge, Valentina Dagienė, who continually combines practical aspects with general research; she was also so kind to point out current papers on Bebras. The author would also like to thank the members of the Bebras community who participated in the short evaluation and feedback round. Finally the author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Brugg-Windisch, Switzerland

    Christian Datzko

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  1. Christian Datzko
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Correspondence to Christian Datzko .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Erik Barendsen

  2. Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Christos Chytas

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Datzko, C. (2021). A Multi-dimensional Approach to Categorize Bebras Tasks. In: Barendsen, E., Chytas, C. (eds) Informatics in Schools. Rethinking Computing Education. ISSEP 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13057. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90228-5_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90228-5_7

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